There's a meme, particularly virulent in educated circles, about how advertising works — how it sways and seduces us, coaxing us gently toward a purchase.

The meme goes something like this:

"Rather than attempting to persuade us (via our rational, analytical minds), ads prey on our emotions. They work by creating positive associations between the advertised product and feelings like love, happiness, safety, and sexual confidence. These associations grow and deepen over time, making us feel favorably disposed toward the product and, ultimately, more likely to buy it."

Here we have a theory — a proposed mechanism — of how ads influence consumer behavior. Let's call it emotional inception or just inception, coined after the movie of the same name where specialists try to implant ideas in other people's minds, subconsciously, by manipulating their dreams.

...

If ads work by inception, then we should be able to advertise to ourselves just as effectively as companies advertise to us, and we could use this to fix all those defects in our characters that we find so frustrating. If I decide I want to be more outgoing, I could just print a personalized ad for myself with the slogan "Be more social" imposed next to a supermodel or private jet, or whatever image of success or happiness I think would motivate me the most. And I would expect such an ad, staring me in the face every day, to have a substantial "inception-style" effect on my psyche. I would gradually come to associate "being social" with warm feelings, and eventually — without ever lifting a finger — I would find myself positively excited about the prospect of going out to bars and parties. Effortless self-improvement: isn't that the magic bullet solution we're always seeking?

But there is no magic bullet, because these arbitrary-association ads don't work by inception.

I love how he came up with two different new terms ("inception", "cultural imprinting") for that which has been known as "branding" since 500 BC. Ads do work that way.

G(ari) F(los) SCO[m]/ SCAURI/ EX OFFI[ci]/NA SCAU/RI Translated as "The flower of garum, made of the mackerel, a product of Scaurus, from the shop of Scaurus"

Apropos of nothing, the leading light in American advertising was limey ex-spy David Ogilvy, who applied what he learned about marketing and human behavior at Gallup to advise the British COINTELPRO operations against the Americans for SIS... then used what he learned about marketing and human behavior doing COINTELPRO for SIS to found Ogilvy and Mather and sell things to Americans.

He's on a horse.

Anybody who thinks they know how advertising works, but thinks the advertising world doesn't, is smelling their own colon.

I think the best way that ads work is that they just remind you that something exists. If it's something you're half interested and ads help keep it in your main thoughts, you're more likely to go after it. After I gave up Reddit, my media consumption for comics, movies, and games pretty much plummeted. I wasn't constantly being reminded about the things I wanted, so I tended to forget about them, and then, I didn't buy as much.

This article feels like a big ol stack of false premises. I think ads can appeal to emotion, but that doesn't mean they're incepting an emotion. Take disney for example - they aren't talking to customers who have never experienced a disney product before, they are talking to customers who have had a good experience with disney before. They aren't telling people how to feel, they're reminding people how they felt.

As for the second section quoted - that process actually works for a lot of people. It's very common for people to tape pictures of their goals to their morning mirror as a motivator. You might be more familiar with a much more common version of this tactic - people keeping pictures of their kids on their desks at work. But once again, this technique is to an emotional appeal that was already within the person.

Advertising is a part of marketing - and good marketing is aware of how a product is viewed in a market. The marketer then makes advertisements to play up the product's strength while downplaying the weakness. If the product's strength is an emotional association - like Coke, which is largely consumed by kids, outside the home, on special outings - then a good marketer will play to that strength.

But all that aside, this is all just one strategy in a huge sea of advertising strategies. The premise that advertising works in one way is like saying all stories are dramas, the funny ones are just very bad dramas.

Before seeing the ad, the product wasn't worth very much to us, but after seeing the ad, we find ourselves wanting to buy it (and at a premium, no less). The problem is that there's no escape, no immunity, from this kind of ad. Once we see it — and know that all our peers have seen it too — it's in our rational self-interest to buy the advertised product.

Sure, why not? All the cool kids are doing it.

It's not a bad article. I actually liked it. But I am unconvinced about the author's point. Especially after his use of the bedsheet example, which feels to contradict its own point. There is no way to avoid advertising influence unless the product isn't likely to come up in a conversation or during any social gathering. Then it doesn't matter what you buy or if it was even advertised. But everything else is, like, totally done via cultural imprinting mechanism. You need a bit more to do a proof by contradiction. The only thing showed here is that there might be things that aren't explained by the proposed mechanism.

I think you're on the right track, but it's hard to prove anything. Deodorant is also a private product, but advertised widely.

It would be interesting to see what sectors spend more on advertising compared to the "size of the market" but I don't know if that would be total revenue or total profit. Automobile brands advertise heavily but gasoline brands are almost invisible.

The other night I saw a Mercedes driving up. It was easy to spot because the famous logo was illuminated. I figured it was a tacky aftermarket accessory, but it's a $480 manufacturer option.

I guess that the author's rebuttal would be "but it's shown to you by happy people who don't smell as bad as you. Would you like to stink in a social gathering next to a grill?" :P

Again, I liked the idea he got. Hell, I'm now mildly interested about how ads work and I can't say that I was inclined to research the topic in more depth than "so how do I optimise uBlock better?" That's something.

Do let us know if you find out. I've always thought the theory of subliminal positive associations was kind of shaky, but I didn't have a better way to explain the amounts of money spent on promotion.

FYI-style ads make sense, and the article gets some support from the kinds of ads I see in my junk mail (a vector that does not let me know how many other people got the same message). They are mostly in the "this service exists" style, sometimes simply a restaurant takeout menu, often with unexciting, practical information like a map to the location and operating hours.

BEZOS: I don't want to delay the conversation but to take the shampoo example. Sometimes it is the right decision for people to buy the brand shampoo instead of the generic even if they are chemically identical. I know a lot about shampoo, you can tell.

THALER: You're using the wrong one.

MYHRVOLD: It's a very important personal decision that I make about my shampoo but the reason people buy a branded product because it's not worth it for them to do the research. A branded product reduces the cognitive load of making a purchasing decision. In a certain sense it's a very rational decision.